A lot of games are similar in multiple ways. For example Wow is similar to Guild wars in it’s action bars. Angry birds is a lot like a game by Armour Games called Crush the Castle (which was before angry birds). Terraria is simular to minecraft in it’s mining and building style of game (although terraria is 2D). and many many more games.

The fact that games are similar is rather irrelevant, as so many games are inspired by other games and concepts or even “Borrow” each others ideas, if there is no copyright being breached I see no problem in this happening with games. I think this game is still rather unique and is great for a companies first game, it’s a shame it got pirated so much.

I’m very tired at seeing this fucking title pop up on every single website I go on about Game Dev Tycoon. Seriously. There is a demo on the website, try it out for yourself. No really. There is. TRY IT. IT’S NOT THAT HARD.

that and the mass pirating of this game. When I was talking my friends about this game, trying to persuade them to get it. they only really knew it as the game that was massively pirated. although we all loved and respected how the company dealt with it, great putting in the piracy bankruptcy into the pirates games.

You could say both games are rip offs of Movie Mogul where you write the choose the film genre, choose the actors and such, lots of games are similar, Rail Road Tycoon and Transport Giant. There are enough difference between both games and to be honest I’ve only played Game Dev Story a little while but spent hours already on Game Dev Tycoon and will be spending hours more

Although the game ideas may be identical, I completely disagree that this game is a copy. In fact I believe this game is MUCH better than Game Dev Story.

I loved GDS, however it was extremely limited with what you could do. The developers were supposed to come out with a feature rich sequel to GDS but have yet to deliver and in my opinion Green Heart Games took a good opportunity to improve on this game idea.

And Movie Mogul (i guess you mean Hollywood Mogul?) wasn’t even the first of it’s kind as Hollywood Pictures was released in 1995 by Starbyte, exact same concept (plus managing a cinema), just like Der Produzent - Die Welt des Films in 1996, Wet - The Sexy Empire in 1997 (slightly different as it was limited to porn movies),
Same goes for this game. There have been quite a few “Manage your own game company”-games before. You think Game Dev Story was the first one? The very first game of this kind i know is Software Manager, released by Kaiko in 1994 for PC and Amiga. But i won’t say that Game Dev Story is a rip-off of it, as the developers propably never heard of it.
There have been several other similar games too, like Software Tycoon released in 2001 and Game Tycoon, which was released in 2003 and heck, even Sega made something like this on the Dreamcast, called Segagaga back in 2001, though it was more of an RPG.

It’s just that after about 50 years of video games, there’s not much left anymore. Everything has already been created at least once.

I’ve played Game Dev Story for +80 hours, and it’s great. But doesn’t compare one bit to Game Dev Tycoon. Game Dev Story is very basic in its design. Imagine a Game Dev Tycoon where you can only build games, no research, no technological advancements, and very little difference between consoles. The scoring system in that game was attrocious (In the beggining you always got around 3-4 average score; and at the end ALWAYS a perfect 10) It was way, way too easy.

I can see the similarities, but Game Dev Tycoon is as huge a leap ahead of Game Dev Story. Imagine Super Mario Bros vs Super Mario 64.

So in the end, while many of their base mechanics are the same, Game Dev Tycoon has added so much more to the game, and they don’t feel the same at all.

Back in the days when I was playing Facebook games–Lord knows why–I was a regular Farm Town player. I remember being stunned when Farmville came out and I gave it a spin…the initial release was a complete, unabashed, gratuitously flagrant copy of Farm Town.

As has already been pointed out in this thread, Greenheart took Game Dev Story as an inspiration (and it can’t be stressed enough that the free and open and gracious acknowledgement of this inspiration is part of what sets Greenheart miles apart from the likes of Zynga). They then ran with it in their own direction, designing something that is very much their own game.

I’ve logged a lot of hours playing Kairosoft titles, and they have a consistent feel, style, and gameplay emphasis that are all quite different from what Greenheart has created. If you set the shared theme to the side for a moment, you should be able to see that in all other respects Game Dev Story has more in common with its Kairo stablemates than it has with Game Dev Tycoon. While for its own part, in actual gameplay Game Dev Tycoon has more in common with Velocigames’ Gamebiz 1 and 2 than it has with Game Dev Story.

(I haven’t played Gamebiz 3…the pricing seemed too ambitious to me and I wasn’t sure the third entry would be different enough from the first two. But maybe other folks here have played it and would recommend it? How about other titles in the same vein? I love this sort of simulation, but the only other computer game with this theme that I can remember trying was the unfortunate German import Game Tycoon.)

All that said, I do see two missteps that Greenheart made that helped foster the “rip-off” meme. The first was the choice of title. If I were their lawyer, I would have strongly recommended that they choose a name less reminiscent of the Kairosoft’s title; if they ignored my advice, I would have fully expected to receive a nastygram from Kairosoft’s lawyers. (Do note, however, that the essence of the legal complaint would not be that the two games were the same thing…but rather that the choice of name might cause consumers to wrongly believe that the two games were the same thing.)

The second misstep was the decision to copy Kairosoft’s distinctive calendar/clock display so precisely. (If I were on the design team, I’d have pushed for a more turn-based approach anyway. Not that I’d have any business being on a design team…I don’t think my prior experience in playing around with lo-res mode on an Apple II would be that much of an asset.)